I used to live in one of the bad parts of San Francisco: Sixth and Mission, where sometimes I would get greeted by prostitutes with their clients doing their business on my apartment building’s staircase. The weird thing is, as the number of crack deals increase, more and more new “trendy” bars and clubs start popping out from nowhere trying to allure the hipster crowd. So it got me thinking, what will this area look like in 20 years?

Not much different, I bet. The streets still look forlorn. The updated public bus models still unkempt. And the bars? Still trying to seduce the in-crowd with cheeky themes and neon lights. Robobeatnik is a fetishized Beatnik-poetry-slam-inspired club. It’s what people in the future interpret as “Beatnik”…so it’s a bit tacky, stereotypic…the “Disneyland” version of what a Beatnik spot is. I was pretty proud of myself of coming up with “Jack KerouWHACK”….I had a good chuckle. LARGE VERSION HERE.

The initial sketch was done with pencil on a flattened brown paper lunch bag. Though it wasn’t my intention at first but I ended up really liking the texture and noise of the paper. Here’s the original drawing:

These paintings were done for a baby girl’s nursery room and each painting is a cartoon version of the family’s real dogs. Initially, the request was for paintings in retro mod style with bold graphics and shapes. The problem was that the whole nursery room was already on mod overload and I suggested that having a more sketchy, simple style for the paintings would balance the room out.

There are five dogs: Tilly, a foxy mutt; Pheobe, a sly beagle; Hei, a black mutt; Jon-Jon, a dopey Old English Sheepdog, and BoBo, another Old English Sheepdog. Shown below are Tilly, Jon-Jon, and Phoebe.

Lah Dee Dah, big deal, a web face lift. But wait! I tend to blog about compelling material and I assure you, dear readers, that this is in fact, very compelling. I was given the job to change the old Gamevideos; better UI, cleaner look, rational organization…the whole shebang. But there’s a catch! It had to be done quick. I had to design a new Gamevideos that will take as little time as possible for Tech to implement the changes so that means absolutely no new functionalities, and all the graphics must remain the same exact dimensions as the previous website. It was a puzzle. And I needed to find the most efficient and effective solution as fast as possible.

Here’s what the original site looked like before:

Now, I’m not going to bad-mouth the poor thing. But I will say this: the Channel Surf Tab and the Video Information module just are so…antiquated and makeshift. I understand that this old version of the site was probably built with a pretty tight deadline as well, hence a lot of the information was forced to fit. I’m pretty proud of the new site version of GV. Take me to it!

With every new season, comes a new intro. That’s when I usually become the honorary video team member for a week and help out. Cesar came up with the great idea of spoofing game covers. Naturally, with brainstorming, hard work, and a gazillion number of takes, the little idea became a fully fleshed-out intro.

I photoshopped a whole bunch of these parody covers and this Sam and Max one is by far the funnest one. It’s pretty rare for me to actually draw anything by hand for work so this particular box cover was a breath of fresh air. I drew all the “new art” by hand and then colored them digitally. So not only did the colors have to match that muted palette of the game box, the caricatures had to have the same illustration style. I did totally style Mike’s afro using Brady Culture as a reference. At first, I was scared that Matt Leone will get pissed that I put him in a bunny/lagomorph suit. But he didn’t. Whew.

This was a commissioned drawing for a children’s book. The theme I was given was “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Funny story is, they ended up not using it because the editor assumed I would draw something more feminine…like princesses or something.

I recently started playing with the Holga and entered the crazy world of medium format. It’s strange…I feel like I have to relearn photography and the art of composition due to the cute but classy square shape. More Holga photographs here, scanned into my flickr.

This was for a feature– a compilation of short narratives of a player’s adventure in Animal Crossing Wild World for the DS. Because it was an offbeat feature, it deserved spot art that was more just blown-up screenshots of the game. So in retrospect, it was pretty refreshing (but weird) of us to couple a short online feature with original, hand-drawn artwork.

Since we opted not to use screenshots, then why not go all the way and just do the opposite? Yup, so the look I was going for is sketchy, painterly, fuzzy, and ethereal. But now looking back at it, I can see that because I had to make these in an hour, I did rush on the coloring so it has an amateur-web-comic look to it.

So from my wordpress blog stats, I see that this post has been getting quite a lot of traffic. I can only assume that it’s Coat, Desk, Chair time at good ol’ Berkeley. If you are currently a Environmental Design 11A student, I feel sorry for you. ED11A really teaches you how to shit diamonds. But fret not, after 11A, you will have all the fundamentals down (more like branded into your brain with a hot poker) and trust me, it will come in handy and save your asses numerous times down the road. If your instructor is Katie Hawkinson, tell her I said hi. She may be the most influential teacher I had at Cal. Here are some tips on Coat, Desk, Chair:

-Unless you have amazing furniture, don’t use your dorm room or your sad apartment. I had crappy plastic chair in my apartment from Walgreens. It’s as interesting as dirt…unless you’re going for the destitute college theme, and I have seen some amazing drawings of the like. You just have to make sure your set-up carries a theme. Dorm rooms and apartments can convey really mixy-matchy confusing notes. Opt for your own studio. Or a library. Or even a window display at Urban Outfitters on Bancroft (if it’s still there).

-Use your time wisely. Does the light source keep on changing? Well then, during your “good light time” mark your shadows and highlights, then fill it in later.

– Don’t be scared of backing up clear decisions you made during the drawing process. And express them diplomatically at your critiques. This doesn’t mean you should provide excuses either. If your instructor thinks your drawing is lame, don’t get down-trodden. Talk about it and find out why it’s lame.

Good luck!

/Edit Update.

The infamous “Coat, Desk, Chair” assignment was something that every Berkeley Architecture student would still have nightmares about years later. The mission, if you choose to accept, is to compose and complete a drawing featuring a coat, a desk, and a chair in one weekend using nothing but a gigantic piece of paper, pencils, and one eraser without the use of a camera. I can see that it doesn’t sound that hard but consider this:

How mundane are coats, desks, and chairs? Especially coats, desks, and chairs of poor college students? So say you’ve composed the most perfect set-up in your living room with the sun shining through the window and creating all the right shadows, and now you decide to start drawing. Oops! Three hours have gone by and the sun is setting, and all of your shadows have moved. Your roommate decides to eat his ramen and watch TV while you’re enjoying your well-earned bathroom break and then knocks over your coat. You come out of the bathroom and witness the horror. Now you’re yelling at him, and then a fight breaks out, ramen is thrown.

This assignment not only tested skills but it also tested smarts. I decided to draw my classroom studio with all the lights off except for my desk light. Sure, I had to spend my weekend in an empty classroom but at least I didn’t have to fling ramen at someone.

The original piece of art, though beautiful, didn’t really fit into EGM’s new lemon-lime clean and punchy style. I did some massive color work and lightened up Misturugi’s face. Underneath that red Kabuki eyeshadow lies a pretty intense Japanese man waiting to be unleashed… if it weren’t for those darn muddy shadows! I cleaned up his face, whitened his eyes, and slapped on a crystal glow onto his sword. I believe the crystal glow was modeled after the sheen of Soul Edge… so at least I’m within the boundaries of accurate lore.

The irony of dorm furniture is that, while it’s marketed as reflecting a unique personal style, everyone ends up owning the same thing. Squeaky inflatable couches, ubiquitous wall-mounted lights in the celestial shapes… dorm furniture’s quirky style pretty much got diluted by mass consumerism. So then I got an idea of designing a DIY wall light kit.

“Doids” are basic in construction, in installation, and in personalization. It starts by making odd-shaped rings out of composite 1/2″ thick wood boards. A sheet of acrylic is cut and secured to the underside of the ring with a heavy-duty stapler. The whole thing is placed over a very high heat source (in this case, vacuum mold machine) with the unstapled side facing down. The heat slowly softens the plastic and gravity pulls it down with uniform force, resulting in a perfectly smooth convex shape. Each Doid then gets assigned a personality and its own story through the magic of black enamel paint. I actually got the idea of naming these “Doids” because the first one I made was the “Bitteroid” that share a similar shape to the cardiod, a curve that can be produced as the path of a point on the circumference of a circle as that circle rolls around another fixed circle with the same radius. Math rocks hard!